This is a transcript of an interview conducted with Harry Carey Jr., at his home in Santa Barbara in October of 2007. The transcript has been edited to include only those comments relating to his father’s partnership with John Ford.
SM: How many films did Harry Carey Senior make with Ford?
HC: They made 26 films together. My mother always said Joseph Harris – he was a character actor, and played the heavy in a lot of my dad’s films – and Joe was a very physical guy, he was in great shape. Anyway, he came up to the ranch (Carey Senior’s home in Newhall) and he stayed for 35 years. He gave up acting and became foreman of the ranch – he loved it up there and actually we couldn’t have run the place without him – but he was also my dad’s closest friend, but my mum always resented him because she said that he broke up Jack [Ford] and Harry. [He] got Ford and my dad kind of mad at one another – it was time for them to split up anyway because they just couldn’t go on making films.
SM: I understand one of the other issues was that your dad was earning a lot more than Ford at the time.
HC: Well, he did at the beginning, he was earning a lot more, but Ford said, ‘Harry Carey guided me along at the beginning’.
SM: What was the situation with your dad at Universal before Ford came along? Was he making films for the studio already?
HC: Yeah, he was making films at Universal, but he wasn’t the big-time [star] at the studio. His pictures always made money, but they were always in a certain budget. Old man [Carl] Laemmle was very clever that way, and my father was very fond of him – he said he was a very fair man. Ford came along – my mother [Olive Golden] was a young actress [at the studio] and she was there with Victoria Ford, who later married Tom Mix, and Dorothy Gish – they were kind of a clique – the girls kind of all ran around together – and one of the rumours was that you didn’t go anywhere near Harry Carey, Henry Walthall or Lionel Barrymore. They were terrible men and would lead you down the primrose path. My mum said that made my father more fascinating to her – he was 19 years older than she was. Actually, mum and Ford were very similar, very close, and they used to kind of hang out together before my dad started courting her. So she knew him much better before my father knew him.
SM: When Ford first came to Universal I understand he initially worked for his brother, Frank
HC: That’s right. He was an assistant for his brother – I have a still picture somewhere that tells the whole story – it shows Francis Ford and Grace Cunard, his leading lady, and Francis is talking to her, while Ford is right back off behind them, and Ford is about 19, 20 years old, and he’s looking like, ‘I’m going to be over there – that’s going to be my spot pretty soon’.
SM: Your wife tells me that you’re pulling together your own collection of memorabilia.
HC: That’s right.
SM: Do you have anything that is relevant to that particular era?
HC: Yes, we have over a hundred and some stills, and also a lot from the African picture, Trader Horn.
SM: I’m trying to get into the Universal archives, but it’s difficult – and there was a fire there recently…
HC: Excuse me for interrupting, but the twenty-six films of Ford and Carey were not that highly regarded, they were not prestige films, and they were filmed on that old nitrate film, and allowed to just sit there and disintegrate. The emulsion wore off, and they never got a good negative out of it and when they did find some in Czechoslovakia and Holland –
SM: A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman…
HC: That’s right.
SM: Do you have any copies of these films?
HC: We’ve got Straight Shooting, and A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman too.
SM: The Last Outlaw. Does that ring a bell with you?
HC: I think Ford was going to do that with Duke [John Wayne] at RKO.
SM: Let me check the Bogdanovich book… actually your father wasn’t in that one. It was Ed Jones. 1919.
HC: Ed Jones was a shooter, a trick-shot guy.
SM: I’ll try and send you over some of the films I’ve tracked down starring your father.
HC: Thank you.
SM: Hell Bent is available for viewing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
HC: Yes, I know about that one. I haven’t been back to New York in five years. My first job was at the World’s Fair, in 1939. I could ride a horse and my music coach – I was trying to be a singer – was going to conduct the orchestra out there and he said ‘they need horseback riders. Why don’t you go out there and see about it and I went there and the guy had me ride around and he said ‘fine, you’ve got the job’ and that’s how I first got started.
SM: Just going back to your dad, when Ford went off to Fox, did he continue playing Cheyenne Harry, and had he played Cheyenne Harry before Ford came along?
HC: No. Cheyenne Harry was all between Ford and him. They wrote these things together. They’d sit at the kitchen table, and work at night, then shoot it the next day. There was a guy called – I don’t remember his name…
SM: The writer?
HC: Yes.
SM: George Hively?
HC: No, Jack Hively. But they [Ford and Carey] would do what they wanted. And when they’d see each other off and on over the years they’d get into an argument, and by this time Ford had this aura and everybody was terrified of him, but not my pop, and he’d say ‘it was my story’ – but it was fun to listen to them.
SM: They say about 70 per cent of all silent films are missing, but there’s about 30 per cent of Ford’s silent films still available, in one form or the other.
HC: I watch those old films of Ford sometimes and see the same old tricks being used over and over again.
SM: And the same locations. I watched a couple of Francis Ford films and they featured the same stockade, and the same actors.
HC: [Henry] Hathaway had that same habit too. Ford had Monument Valley, and Hathaway had Lone Pine, California. Anyway, it was an interesting era. It ended when I was born in 1921, and that was when they [Carey and Ford] went their different ways. It was better for everybody concerned. Ford of course took off like wildfire. The Iron Horse was the big turning point.
SM: That’s the one Joseph McBride said made him famous.
HC: They [the studio] could trust him with money. But they [Carey and Ford] had gags they’d do if they ran out of dough. It was very simple then. It wasn’t like they – they didn’t have to go through all these channels and paperwork. They’d want to extend the picture but they didn’t want Laemmle to know they were doing it so they’d say that the film dropped in the water and they needed – they’d come out with these crazy ideas to get some more film. A couple of times Laemmle fired them because of that stuff, then he’d hire them back of course when he ran the film.
SM: Would you say your dad and Ford were trying something different in the way your dad portrayed his cowboy character, Cheyenne Harry?
HC: Exactly right. The two of them were very much alike in their creative styles [and] they loved the idea of the tramp cowboy, not the kind with the fancy clothes […]. [Cheyenne Harry] was the sort of adventurous guy who doesn’t know what’s coming up next and he sort of wanders around. That’s the kind of characters they liked, and basically that was the Cheyenne Harry character. They had a good time writing these scripts and plotting it all out. They lived in Newhall, California, in a little white house, and they’d sit in the kitchen and talk about the next day and then they’d go and shoot it, around Newhall and that area. It was all low budget and they couldn’t afford to go away to big fancy locations.
SM: So after Ford left Universal, your dad didn’t carry on making Cheyenne Harry films?
HC: No. That was the end of that. My dad – he had a career that went up and down. He was the only Western star that became a regular character actor that could do other roles. The other ones were more or less limited to those – like Mix and all of them, they were bigger names than pop was but of course he had a career, went on to Mr Smith Goes to Washington, all those other films, so he was a much better actor than most of them. And that’s what Gene Autry said one time when he was here. He said ‘The best actor of them all was Harry Carey’, and that’s true. He was.
Working within the framework of the Hollywood system, one can detect in Ford’s
(Fig. 5.12) (Fig. 5.13)
son by filming what was for him a rare close-up featuring the couple in question (Fig. 5.12).
Their devotion to each other is rendered comical at times, simply by the appearance of the mother dressed in over-sized bonnet and boots, and the manner in which she holds on to the back of her son‘s shirt as they walk down the aisle of the local church (Fig. 5.13).The theme of mother-love does not appear to be a constant in Ford’s Universal films. Evaluated in more detail in the following chapters, the motif of mother-love evolves into a key component of Ford’s late-1920s Fox work, although the theme eventually disappears from his sound films. The continued emphasis on the central role of the matriarch within the family suggests that this theme is not so much a result of studio convention, however, but more a reflection of the director’s relationship with his own mother.
Steve Mayhew 